The illustration shows the south transept proper, looking towards the
great rose window. On our right we see the historical side, to our left
is Poets' Corner; from here the statue of Shakespeare is the most
conspicuous, standing out from the mass of other memorials which
commemorate poets and literary men. The glass in the window above and
the lights below it are quite modern, placed there as a memorial to the
late Duke of Westminster in 1902.
* * * * * *
Upon our right is the so-called "historical" side of the transept, where
are collected the monuments of many distinguished literary men, not
historians only, whose names are more familiar to us than {42} the
majority of poetasters who were honoured with tributes in Poets' Corner
proper. The busts of Grote and Thirlwall were placed here by Dean
Stanley, in close proximity to other classical scholars. These two
friends each compiled a history of Greece without the other's knowledge,
till the publication of Thirlwall's surprised Grote, but made no change
in their friendship. They are buried in the same grave, near Macaulay.
We tread now upon the tombstone of Dean Ireland; with him rests the
companion of his youth and the friend of his maturity, William Gifford,
editor of the _Quarterly Review_ at the time when its biting reviews cut
many a rising poet, including Keats, to the heart. Ireland's name must
ever be held dear by all visitors to the Abbey, for under his orders the
nave and transepts, formerly accessible only on payment of a fee, were
opened free to the general public. The quaint half-figure of William
Camden claims our attention next. We see the famous antiquary and
historian "in habit as he lived," with his hand upon his great work, the
_Britannia_. Camden belongs to Westminster in every sense: as a boy he
was a _protégé_ of Goodman's, as a young man he became usher, and he
ultimately rose to be headmaster of the school. {43} Later on he gave up
teaching in order to devote himself to antiquarian research, encouraged
by the approval of the Queen, and supported by the salary he received as
Herald. He continued to dwell in Dean's Yard, and loved to wander in the
Abbey, meditating amongst the tombs; the fruit of his solitary hours here
was the first attempt at a guide-book, a list of the monuments, which
was, however, written in Latin, and therefore of no use to the ordinary
tourist. His own monument was sadly knocked about twenty-three years
(1643) after his death by some rough fellows, probably Cavaliers, who
broke into the Abbey one night, and on their way to deface Lord Essex's
hearse took the nose off poor Camden; the damage they did was repaired in
the eighteenth century at the expense of Oxford University. Next to
Camden, upon a plain mural monument, is inscribed the name of Isaac
Casaubon. We know him by repute only as a celebrated French scholar, who
was tempted from his native land by King James I. with the offer of a fat
canonry at Canterbury, but who only lived to enjoy the sinecure post--he
was a layman--four years. Surely there must be fishermen amongst us: to
them the initials I. W. scratched upon Casaubon's memorial may recall the
great angler, Isaac [Transcriber's note: "Izaak" in Index] Walton, {44}
even though we have no means of proving that these were actually his
handiwork; but as a friend of Casaubon's son, and a namesake and admirer
of the father, there is no incongruity in associating the two names.
The "burlesque" statue of the famous actor, David Garrick, with "a
farrago of false thoughts and nonsense inscribed below," must ever be
associated with Charles Lamb, who thus appropriately described it. With
Garrick himself is indissolubly connected the memory of his lifelong
friend, Dr. Samuel Johnson, whose familiar form, with its brown coat and
tie wig, was conspicuous at the funeral, standing close to Shakespeare's
monument, tears coursing down his cheeks for the loss of his dear Davy.
Five years later, Mrs. Garrick herself, once a brilliant, graceful
dancer, now a little shrivelled old woman, stood by the doctor's open
grave in this same transept, bowed with age and overcome with grief.
In this transept there are monuments to another actor and an actress,
celebrated in their own day. Barton Booth, a Westminster scholar under
Dr. Busby, rose to a high place in his profession; his wife, once like
Mrs. Garrick a popular dancer, put up the tablet. His memory still
survives in two {45} Westminster streets, called Barton Street and Cowley
Street, after his name and the place where he was buried. Mrs. Pritchard
was honoured by a memorial near Shakespeare's statue, upon which the
poet-laureate of the day wrote a florid inscription. She began her
professional career after Booth's death, but lived long enough to tread
the same boards as Garrick, whose grave is just below; she predeceased
the younger actor by ten years. Only one actress, Ann Oldfield, who
belonged to an earlier generation (she flourished in the beginning of the
eighteenth century), was buried actually within the Abbey; a woman of no
character but of some talent, she lies near the Deanery door in the nave.
We must not forget, when we reach St. Andrew's Chapel, to point out the
colossal statues of Mrs. Siddons and her brother, John Kemble, upon whose
shoulders fell the mantles of Mrs. Barry and Garrick, and who carried on
the old traditions at Drury Lane and Covent Garden during the first
quarter of the nineteenth century.
We have digressed from our beaten path to follow after the lights of the
theatrical profession, and shall afterwards find other well-known players
in the cloisters. A glance round, as we stand in the western part of the
transept, shows that we are {46} literally surrounded by familiar faces
and much-loved authors. Of Addison we speak later, so may pass over his
very inferior statue (by Westmacott), but just beyond we see the busts of
Lord Macaulay and of Thackeray, and the medallion heads of Sir Walter
Scott and of John Ruskin; below them is the grave of Charles Dickens.
The lovers of music raise their eyes meantime to the unwieldy figure of
Handel, whose personality remained essentially German although the
greater part of his life was spent in England, at the Court of the first
three Georges. Beneath his monument is the medallion of that gifted
singer Jenny Lind Goldschmidt, placed there as a record of the many
occasions when the Swedish nightingale interpreted Handel's beautiful
music to the British public in a manner never excelled before or since.
Close to us now is a reminder of the old monastic days--the door which
leads into an ancient chapel used by the brethren as a vestry, and in the
floor before it is the grave of Abbot Litlington, to whom we have alluded
before and of whom we shall speak again. Near his is that of a humble
monk, one Owen Tudor, who took sanctuary during the Wars of the Roses,
and probably lived to see his nephew, Henry Tudor, on the English throne.
Above the {47} door Oliver Goldsmith's name recalls the early days of the
English novel, when the _Vicar of Wakefield_ was one of the very few in
existence. Many of us have enjoyed his inimitable comedy, _She Stoops to
Conquer_, on the stage, as well as those popular plays, _The Rivals_ and
_The School for Scandal_, by the other eighteenth-century Irish
dramatist, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, whose tombstone is beneath our
feet. That great portrait painter Sir Joshua Reynolds is responsible for
the position and design of Goldsmith's medallion, which spoils the
architecture, and is so high that even classical scholars rarely attempt
to decipher Dr. Johnson's pompous inscription. The cynical English
lines, which the poet Gay wrote for his own tablet close by, are far more
often noticed:--
Life is a jest and all things show it;
I thought so once and now I know it.
A preposterous and affected statue to our left, with the immortal name of
Shakespeare below it, has distracted the eyes of our friends, and
comments are freely made when we tell them how nearly the bones of the
sweet Swan of Avon were brought from Stratford to this burial-place of
poets. The monument itself was erected by subscription more than a
century after Shakespeare's {48} death, but the removal of the body had
been averted long before by Ben Jonson's protest and the dramatist's
posthumous curse. The Scotchmen with us, who have just gazed with much
appreciation at Chantrey's bust of their national novelist, a replica of
the one at Abbotsford, now look up to the heavy-featured face of Burns,
their national poet. We pause to tell them that this memorial was placed
here twenty-one years ago, and was paid for with shilling subscriptions,
which were voluntarily contributed by all classes in Scotland, from the
highest to the lowest. Southey and Coleridge are the next on the eastern
wall, and we find their names familiar to all those who have toured in
the Lake country, although few of their works are read now by the
generality, save possibly Southey's _Life of Nelson_. Campbell's bust is
at the angle where we turn into the original Poets' Corner, and several
of those around us call to mind his still popular poems, notably
"Hohenlinden" and the "Battle of the Baltic." A few steps further and we
stand upon the vault of Edmund Spenser, that prince of poets, who was
buried in close proximity to the tomb of Geoffrey Chaucer, the father of
English poetry. Within this vault moulder not only the dust of Spenser,
{49} but the funeral odes and the pens wherewith they were writ, which
his friends, the poets and literary men of the day, threw old Camden
tells us upon his coffin. Elizabeth herself, according to a contemporary
writer, mindful of the tribute paid to her in the _Fairie Queen_, ordered
a monument to be erected in honour of her poet, but this was never done:
she died three years later, and some said that a greedy courtier
embezzled the money intended for this purpose. Whatever the truth, a
literary Countess, Lady Dorset, repaired the omission twenty years
afterwards, but by the following century her memorial had crumbled away,
and was replaced by a copy, for which Gray's friend Mason collected a sum
of money. After Spenser's burial this part of the transept was dedicated
to the memory of poets, and amongst many forgotten names are others of
undying fame. Before us, for instance, are Ben Jonson and Milton.
Jonson, who knew Shakespeare and owed much to his friendship with Lord
Bacon, died as did so many of his literary contemporaries, in poor
circumstances: like Chaucer and Spenser, he ended his life in a house
close to the Abbey, in King Street, which was recently demolished. His
body was buried in the nave, {50} standing upright on its feet; the words
"O rare Ben Jonson," which are repeated on the monument, were cut upon
the stone at the charge of a certain Sir Jack Young, who happened to be
passing when the mason was fixing the gravestone. The ancient
inscription has been placed against the wall to preserve the lettering,
and a modern paving stone marks the place of the vault. The buttons of
the poet's coat, which are on the wrong side in his bust, gave rise to
the couplet:--
O rare Ben Jonson, what a turncoat grown,
Thou ne'er wast such till thou wast carved in stone.
While roystering Ben waited a hundred years before his literary
distinction was recognised by this memorial in Poets' Corner, the
strength of Royalist feeling kept Milton's name out of the Abbey
altogether for the same period after his death. Thus, although both men
died in the seventeenth century, their monuments date from the middle of
the eighteenth. Milton's name was regarded as anathema by the loyal
Chapter, and it was not till long after the Jacobite Atterbury's exile,
that a Dean (Wilcocks) was broad-minded enough to acknowledge Milton's
genius, and allow an admirer of his, one Benson, to put up a monument.
The lyric muse above Gray's medallion {51} close by, points to the bust
of that master of poetry and prose, to whom he and all the poets ever
since Milton's time owe so much. Gray himself must always be remembered
in the Abbey, for who can stand amongst the kings and look upon the
"mighty conquerors, mighty lords," who made this island kingdom, without
recalling the words of his historic ode?
Nowadays, when by common consent Chaucer is regarded as the patriarch of
English poets, visitors to this transept naturally consider that he was
buried here on account of his literary reputation. But this was not the
case. At one time a favourite of kings, Chaucer was also a connection by
marriage with his powerful patron John of Gaunt, yet he seems to have
died in comparative poverty. He was Clerk of the Works at the royal
palace hard by, and a dweller beneath the shadow of the old Lady Chapel;
his burial in the adjoining church followed as a matter of course, simply
because he resided within the precincts. For nearly a hundred and fifty
years the only record of his grave was a leaden plate, with a Latin
inscription by an Italian poet, which hung upon the pillar near. At last
one Brigham, himself with a turn for verse-making, procured an ancient
marble {52} tomb, and got permission to put it up against this wall. It
has been called by Chaucer's name ever since; but whether the poet's
bones still lie in the original grave, where Dryden's coffin was
afterwards placed, or were transferred here, is still a moot-point. The
modern window above, the gift of an American admirer, contains portraits
of Chaucer and his contemporary John Gower. Quite lately another painted
glass window, dedicated to the Confessor, has been inserted beside it.
John Dryden, whose reputation equalled Spenser's in his own day, died,
like Chaucer (1400) and Spenser (1599), at the end of a century, in his
case the eighteenth, and his burial in Chaucer's grave, near the entrance
to St. Benedict's Chapel, was a mark of special honour. To reach his
beautiful bust, a copy by Scheemakers of an earlier one, we must pass
over the gravestones of two well-known modern poets, Alfred, Lord
Tennyson, and Robert Browning. On a pillar close by is Woolner's bust of
Tennyson, which represents the laureate in middle life. The name of
Abraham Cowley on a stone beside them conveys little to us now, but his
contemporary reputation was very great, and Dryden owed much to Cowley,
his immediate predecessor in the circle of poets. Before we move on
there are two busts {53} which are artistically very inferior to
Dryden's. I refer first to that of Longfellow, whose name is a household
word on either side of the Atlantic, and of whom Americans are justly
proud. On the other column is that of the Scotch Archbishop of
Canterbury, Archibald Tait, placed here with intent, because in the
vicinity lies another Primate also of Scotch birth, Spottiswoode,
Archbishop of St. Andrews, a favourite with King James I., and by his
command historian of the Scottish Church.
* * * * * *
[Illustration: Chaucer's Tomb]
* * * *